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A bird

I came across a sparrow yesterday on the busy corner near B&A’s daycare on the way to pick them up. It looked like a tiny pile of leaves on the concrete, and people kept coming *this close* to stepping on it by accident. I realized what it was in exactly the same moment as a dad and his kid three steps ahead of me, the little boy started whispering worriedly. I picked it up gently and put it in the nearest reasonable spot, a very tall planter with a lot of greenery. It was like nothing, a little mound of trembling lint with claws. I know you’re not supposed to move stunned birds but I figured there was no way it wasn’t going to get flattened like a pancake otherwise. And it made sense, I was literally seconds away from daycare where they had a bathroom right by the door and I could wash my hands.

In the few remaining steps to daycare, I was instantly overwhelmed by a huge wave of deja vu and dread. I suddenly thought, “bird flu…” and was mentally thrown back in to the earliest days of the pandemic when everything was dire and nothing was certain, when we were wiping our groceries down with bleach wipes, wearing masks when passing someone on a trail in the woods, living with a permanent empty lump lodged somewhere between our throats and the base of our skulls and thinking, “Surely this isn’t right? Am I doing something wrong? Is this what I’m supposed to do to stay safe, to keep everyone safe, to make this go away?”

I washed my hands for 40 seconds and tried to stop thinking about it, but the feeling lingered the rest of the night, this existential what-if-I-just-seriously-fucked-up feeling, and it’s still sort of present now. I know it’s extreme but also, life feels pretty extreme right now.

I picked up AB and BB, and told BB about the bird. We walked up to the planter and found it still there, but under a few more leaves. It was gone by the same time the next day.

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“Don’t want a song”

I put BB to bed last night for the first time in a little while and asked him what song he wanted me to sing, as usual. He said, “I don’t want a song.” A little bit of me died.

I think it’s because I don’t get to put him to bed often due to feeding AB. It’s kind of like holding him in my arms too, I couldn’t pick him up for most of the time I was pregnant with AB and then now, he doesn’t want to be picked up. Just the first of many letting go-s.

Edit 26 February 2025: Last night, I was singing all sorts of nonsense to AB while putting her to bed. BB overheard me and asked why she gets lots of songs. I told him I thought he didn’t like it. So maybe the secret is a little good old fashioned jealousy, then I’ll get to sing to him again.

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Overheard on 7th

I was walking to the grocery store just now with AB in the carrier. A man bumped me accidentally rushing after a woman about his age, maybe both mid-70s. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her to him.

“Where are you going?!”

Silence.

“You want to go home?”

She nods.

Gently turning her the opposite direction, “But home is this way.”

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Hello again

Red dragonfly on a wooden rail in the sun

It’s been a while! My site has fallen majorly by the wayside which both feels appropriate (see first point below) and makes me a bit sad. There’s a lot I’ve already forgotten. I want to analyze a bit more why I haven’t been posting… but that’s something I need to think a bit more about first.

A few notes to catch up on major points, and then hopefully back to posting semi-regularly.

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A postponed postpartum story

This is a mega-post about our daughter AB’s arrival a little over two months ago, with a bit about BB’s birth three years ago thrown in. I wanted to note some of that at the time but never did.

It’s mostly so I don’t forget, but maybe someone else will find it useful too. Maybe AB in the future if she ever decides to have kids.

This gets a bit in the weeds. If you’d rather not read about things like breastfeeding, IVs, episiotomies, etc, probably best to skip this.

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Shower thought on trust

The more time passes, the more I think that establishing relationships, or repairing imperfect ones, is mostly about establishing mutual trust. Friends, work colleagues, family members, anyone really. Obviously a heck of a lot of other factors impact whether or not the relationship is enjoyable. But without trust, it’s really hard to maintain most of those other factors (respect, affection, communication, mindfulness, etc).

Been thinking about this a lot lately in the context of building and maintaining happy, healthy teams, but then realized that it applies in a lot of other areas as well.

Next question: how do you establish trust? It has something to do with demonstrating vulnerability, particularly if you’re in the more “powerful” position within a relationship… (Important to remember that power is the sum total of a bajillion possible factors; age, personality, org structure, gender, personal network, race, and much more.) But that’s not a fully-baked thought, there’s definitely more to it than that.

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“When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them”

[Rewilding is] a fundamentally cheerful and workmanlike approach to what can seem insoluble problems. It doesn’t micromanage. It creates room for “ecological processes [which] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command-and-control.

Worth reading: “We Need To Rewild The Internet”, an essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon published two days ago on Noema Magazine’s site. Came across it via the ever-excellent Today in Tabs.

An essay about improving the internet that kicks off with an Ursula K. Le Guin quote is always going to have me from the start.

Salient bolded lessons from ecologists that technologists should adopt:

  • shifting baselines are real
  • complexity is not the enemy, it’s the goal
  • diversity is resiliance

Also, they raise an extremely important but often-neglected point that standards development organizations (SDOs) are “increasingly under the control of a few companies; so what appear to be “voluntary” standards are often the business choices of the biggest firms.”

***

Related reads:

See this Noema essay by Cory Doctorow.

Pls read “The Fediverse of Things”, a blog post by Terence Eden. Can’t remember who boosted this in to my Fedi timeline last week, but thank you whoever you are.

On the topic of infrastructure bottlenecks and maintenance: “The Cloud Under The Sea” by Josh Dzieza for The Verge. It’s about the undersea cables that form a large part of the internet’s infrastructure, told through the lens of a repair ship crew’s activities before and after the 9.1-scale earthquake that devastated Japan in 2011. Like they say in the rewilding article, redundancy !== diversity. Off the back of this article, I need to read “Rethinking Repair” by professor Steven Jackson.

***

Mandatory interoperability, federated “social” accounts for infrastructure and public services, levying major search engines to publicly finance key internet infrastructure, user-enabled global privacy control for all… a girl can dream.

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Team retreat at the Eames Archives and Ranch

Last week, the Eames Institute Digital Product team got together at the newly-opened Eames Archives in Richmond, CA and the currently-under-renovation Ranch in Petaluma, CA. Llisa Demetrios – one of the Eames grandchildren, a founder of the Eames Institute, and our Chief Curator – gave DP a private tour of the Archives, and we walked from one end of the Ranch to the other guided by Farm Manager David Evershed, Director of Ranch Operations Benjamin Godfrey, and VIP (Very Important Puppy) Tipsy. Incredible to explore and meet them + so many other EI folks IRL.

I won’t share pics of the Archives since my photos either have people in (I don’t like sharing faces without permission) or are basically low-qual versions of the much better photos you can find on the website. And I won’t share much about what DP got up to discussion-wise, hoping to share our progress in a different format elsewhere soon.

But here are a few snaps of the Ranch as well as some of my favorite tidbits + moments.

Huge oak trees framing the Turnbull barn at the Eames Ranch in Petaluma, CA

Looking west to the Turnbull barn at the Eames Ranch in Petaluma, CA

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